Tuesday, December 6, 2016

My White Privilege

The founders of my personal affirmative action program: Alvie &Marguerite Meyer, in the 1920s, around the time they began transforming their poor, Hoosier farming upbringings into middle class success.

Most white folks I know deny white
privilege, refusing to apply American history to their own success and comfort.
But I recognize full well my own personal affirmative action program.

My grandfather Meyer grew up in a
poor German-speaking farming family in northern Indiana in the early 20th
Century. In fact, though he and all 12 of his siblings were born in America,
they didn’t bother speaking English until they went to school – good schools.
As a young man he took a solid work ethic and education to the nearest small
town, married my grandmother and got a job at the post office.

I imagine the African American
version of my grandfather. That man’s grandparents were slaves. His ancestors' culture, religion, and language were substantially suffocated by slavery, then Jim Crow.
If he had a school, it wasn’t as good as my grandfather’s. He too probably grew
up in hard circumstances, but there was no postman's job for him. Though he
might have been a janitor at a post office earning far less than my white
grandfather.

I once interviewed a Hoosier African
American woman whose husband was the rarest of 1930s black men. He got a degree
in chemistry at IU. After graduation he applied for a job at Eli Lilly, but was
told, “The only job we’ve got for you involves a broom and a mop.”

My grandfather wasn’t ambitious
enough to get a degree at IU, but qualified for a better job than his black IU
peer. That IU chemistry grad never used his degree.

My grandfather learned that if you
work hard and play by the rules, you’ll be rewarded. What did the black IU grad
learn? I’m guessing he didn’t learn the same lesson from his experiences that
my grandfather learned from his. He might have learned a bitterness that my
grandfather couldn’t understand.

After their sons entered school, my
grandmother worked as a secretary. They bought a house in the 1930s and built
equity with each payment. As they approached retirement, they paid cash for a
new home. The number one way American families have built wealth in the past
century is through homeownership. During the years my grandparents bought their
homes, banks drew lines around minority neighborhoods, systematically denying
loans to African Americans, and if giving them loans at all, did so at elevated
interest rates. It was legal and called “redlining.”

My grandparents were good,
hardworking people. There’s nothing in the rewards of their labor to apologize
for. But that opportunity to build wealth was systematically denied to their
black counterparts.

The two hardest working people I've ever known: My father, Jim, in
1951, and my mother, Nancy, in 1952, in their graduation photos.
They were about to set off for the middle class success that would
make all things possible for me and my siblings. I was slapped in
the face just once as a child, and it was by that sweet looking
woman on the right. I'd said the word, "nigger." While my face was
stinging and tears trickled down my cheeks, she gave me a
clenched-teeth explanation of what that word meant and why I
should never say it again.

Jim Crow laws were still in affect
when my father went to college. It didn’t just keep the black versions of my
father and uncle from white lunch counters and bus front rows, in their
alternate American universe, blacks were segregated in poorly funded schools.
Few made it to college, because of course their parents hadn’t built wealth
from home ownership, wealth that could be turned into college degrees for the
next generation.

Still, there's nothing about their
Purdue engineering degrees for my father or uncle to apologize
for. Degrees weren’t handed out like candy. They worked hard for them. But
they got opportunities kept from their black counterparts, black men who likely
lived with a bitterness that I know my dad and uncle didn't understand.

In my little Indiana hometown in the
1960s and ‘70s I went to safe, nurturing schools. I was blessed; born white and
middle class in 1960 in an all-white town, attending an all-white school and
learning along side kids whose families had not-so-different backgrounds from
mine. I say "blessed" because these were places with the best
resources, where the spoils of earlier generations were concentrated so that
even if you were white, poor, and uneducated, there were radiating waves of
economic activity that provided decent jobs.

My father's engineering job put me in
a big house on a nice, crime-free street. And there was enough money to send my
mom to night school and summer classes. She got a teaching degree and
taught elementary school.

In the late 1960s I saw black people
rioting on the evening news, behaving with a bitterness I couldn’t understand.
Though I didn’t try very hard in high school, I still got into college. I
wonder how many of my African American counterparts could say they day-dreamed
their way through high school and still got into college in the 1970s.

As an adult I worked hard to build a
successful career as a school teacher, then Realtor, working both jobs for
years, often 7 days a week. There’s nothing in my success to apologize
for.

Me in 1976: Slouching toward graduation.

Around my 40th birthday, a couple years after my grandmother
died, I received a check for $60,000. It was my cut of the
estates of that frugal postal worker and secretary. I’m not sorry I got
it. I’m proud of my family heritage. But I’m Christian-enough to wonder about
my African American counterpart – the grandson of the man who couldn’t get a
post office job in the 1920s because his skin was black – the son of a man who
didn’t go to college in the 1950s because his skin was black, the same guy who
didn’t get a check for $60,000 like I did.

I invested that money in my home and
my kids’ college funds. And so our white family’s affirmative action program
continues echoing down a full century, long past the passage of the Civil
Rights Act and to the end of the first black president’s two terms in office.

Two of my kids have college degrees –
the youngest is still in college. They have no apologies to make for their
opportunities. But I suspect, like the 3 generations of Meyers before them,
they encounter black peers who harbor bitterness. With pride, I see them trying
to understand.

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About Me

The Contrarian's work has appeared in the Noblesville Daily Ledger, The Noblesville Times, NUVO Newsweekly, The Indianapolis Eye (web-based), The Noblesville Current, and at www.dailyyonder.com. He is the co-founder of the literary journal, the Polk Street Review, where his stories also appear. His novel, Stardust was published in 2002 and has just been republished again under the title "Noblesville," by River's Edge Media. His 2nd novel, The Salvage Man, was released August of 2015 by River's Edge. Kurt is a former school teacher and a Realtor.